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Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Texas dominates immigration detention

Via Texas Prison Bidness:

The Detention Watch Network has released some terrific data and graphs on the private prison industry's role in the United States' immigrant detention system.... Amongst the interesting findings, 49% of all immigrant detention beds in the United States are operated by private prison corporations. That is higher percentage of privatized beds than nearly any other state or federal agency.

Texas has more private immigrant detention beds - more than 10,000 - than any other state. Furthermore, some of the largest immigrant detention centers in the country are in Texas, including MTC's Willacy County Processing Center and GEO Group's South Texas Detention Center. The report includes a complete breakdown of every major private detention center by average daily population.

20 comments:

Arce
said...

And these companies write legislation and lobby for it to have state's adopt statutes that further criminalize the undocumented and authorize state detention of the undocumented and some citizens along the way.

What I do not understand is why do we have detention centers anyways? If there are illegals crossing the border, wouldn't it make more sense to finger print them, take their picture, put them in front of a judge and then on a bus to Nueve Laredo within 12 hours? I don't get the need to have 'beds', when the solution is to document them as illegal and send them home as fast as possible.

That's the biggest catch, 8:55. The same folks engaging in demagoguery over border security in the Senate (Hi John Cornyn!) won't approve any new federal judges while the backlog grows and grows. And given that ICE/Border Patrol not infrequently round up US citizens accidentally, the due process element is not insignificant.

Also, immigration law is inexorably intertwined with family law, families are often messy, and thus these cases are often a lot more complex than you portray.

Anon 8:55- these folks are also owed their right to due process. Not everyone locked up in those detention centers is in the country illegally, just as not everyone in prison or county jails is guilty as charged. We can't simply nab people from their homes in the middle of the night and send them back across the border without ensuring that they are in fact guilty of something. And as Scott said, we have federal judge vacancies in Texas that need to be filled. I honestly hope someone has filed habeas corpus writs on these detainees who have been sitting in these facilities for months since the vacancies are, no doubt, violating their constitutional right to a speedy trial.

I believe I am a bit ignorant on the entire matter then. I thought there 'beds' were simply for individuals they have caught in the act of coming into the country, I didn't think about individuals that might be on the street and get busted THEN are deemed worthy of investigation for being illegal. Sorry about my shortsightedness.

How many million cross over illegally each year? Look in your neighborhood. How has it been changed in the last ten years by this massive influx? You can believe what the the advocates try to get you to believe, or you can just look with your own eyes.

Anon 10:34- That sounds like the same bs people griped about when all them Irish and Italians and Germans, and Eastern Europeans came flooding into this country. Same song and dance to the same tune, but this time the audience happens to speak Spanish. Get over it.

These detention centers don't do anything to curb the illegal immigration problem. They only take low-risk individuals and crowd them into a prison where they languish in a system that was not designed to handle the load. As has been noted several times on this log, the REAL problem here in Texas is the lack of federal judges due to political stall tactics in DC that have kept our vacancies on the benches. We need judges to review these cases and get them processed. Too many people are just sitting in these facilities waiting for someone somewhere to do something.

You proposing that undocumented is a synonym with illegal alien is an example of willful blindness or purposeful obsfucation. It is widely known that the open border advocates have forcefully pushed to replace the term illegal alien with undocumented.

Would you be so kind as to tell us who these people are? I've lived here all my life, yet have never seen nor heard anything about these 'advocates', except ofcourse from the likes of that douchebag O'Reilly, and the scrotum-baggers. So please enlighten those of us that do not sit in our deer blinds, looking south through our scope, hoping to see lines of UNDOCUMENTED workers passing by.

Anonymous said:"I don't get the need to have 'beds', when the solution is to document them as illegal and send them home as fast as possible."

This is why they need to have beds:I was an honor roll student in high school, looking for a summer job until I could start art college on scholarship in fall. I wanted to be a forensic artist--a police sketch artist.Instead what I got was ICE (It was INS then) at my doorstep initiating deportation procedings. I found out from ICE that I was adopted (a SHOCK!!!) and the adoption paperwork was never filed. So I was an illegal. I had never done anything wrong, and the ony thing they could get me on was lying on an employment application,saying I was a citizen when I couldn't prove I was.With immigration you're not innocent until proven guilty-you're guilty until you prove you're innocent.And I couldn't prove I was legally adopted because I had never known I was!I struggled with the system for three years. Neither of my adoptive parents were around to ask, to blame or take responsibility, and legally I was an adult at 18 and could be held as an adult. I wrote to every courthouse in every state that my parents lived in between 1979 and 1980. Colorado, New York, and Maryland asking if there was a record of my adoption. An immgration officer finally took pity on me and assigned me a work visa so I could stay (and be free via electronic monitoring) while I located my paperwork, but in the meantime my college scholarship vanished, my career with it, and even though I did finally locate the adoption decree (a single priceless piece of paper) now I have to tell every employer I work for for the rest of my life that I was illegal, and beause I was illegal I cannot get a job in local, state, or federal goverment. I can't be a sketch artist, I can't be a police officer, I can't be lawyer--all careers I had considered in high school. All because of one single sheet of paper.

THAT is why they need beds so people like me have a chance. Undocumented does not mean illegal.

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